Histórico e Conceitos Básicos
A SALA CHINESA, John Searle (1980)
One of the classic arguments against strong AI is made by John Searle in "Minds, brains and programs" (BBS, 1980). Searle's claim is that any instantiation of a formal procedure, such as a running computer program, is necessarily operating, to use linguistic terms, at a syntactic rather than semantic level. This lack of meaning, Searle insists, must mean that the computer program does not have true understanding and is not truly thinking, it is simply manipulating symbols.
Searle presents this argument by describing and analyzing his now famous "Chinese room." He begins by discussing a contemporary computer program written by Roger Schank which attempts to answer questions about a story it has been given. Searle remarks that this choice of program is not central to his argument, but is only an example. Searle then proposes that instead of running the program on a computer, the algorithm of the program can be represented as a series of written instructions which he himself could follow. To assure that he is following the instructions and not simply answering the questions himself, the story, the questions, and the answers would all be represented in written Chinese, a language which Searle does not know.